The manufacture of reality vs. the power of individual imagination

The manufacture of reality vs. the power of individual imagination

“People want one story line. Smooth, with no fractures. So that’s what mind-engineers give them.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

This article is an introduction to my 3 collections: The Matrix Revealed, Exit From The Matrix, and Power Outside The Matrix. I invite you to read about these collections at nomorefakenews.

Reality is a psychological operation.

At the most primitive level, “Reality” basically means some group has force, money, and access to fawning media. They can define what exists.

A psyop depends on being able to engineer one story line.

A psyop depends on selling one centralized story.

In the case of Ebola, for example, the whole unfolding storyline depended on selling basic assumptions: a) there was an unusual outbreak; b) the outbreak was caused by a single virus and nothing else.

These assumptions and the ensuing storyline were sold by major media, with no exceptions. There were no defectors.

If, tomorrow, the head of the CDC announced that no one had ever extracted the Ebola virus from a human being, isolated it, and seen it, he would be locked up in a psych ward.

He defected from reality, which is to say, the psyop.

If, tomorrow, the head of the FDA announced that GMO crops and the herbicide Roundup were a clear and present danger to the population of the world, and constituted a grave crime, he would be fired and blacklisted.

If, magically, overnight, you found yourself in possession of overwhelming force and a direct pipeline to elite media anchors and their bosses, you could tell your story about What Exists, and you would find millions of people believing you.

This is how reality works.

What would happen if the three major networks, each with considerable power, had come up with three vastly different versions of the Boston Marathon massacre?

CBS: “FBI and local police killed one terrorist and captured the other in what observers are calling one of the bravest days in the history of law enforcement in America.”

NBC: “After a violent gun battle on the streets of a great American city, during which a suspect in the Boston massacre was killed, an FBI source stunningly revealed they had ended the life of a cooperating informant. He put it this way: ‘The Tsarnaev brothers were recruited by a secret Bureau unit to plant the bombs. The plan was to blame the bombing on so-called patriots, but that fell through, so the Bureau exercised their only option. They put their informants front and center and blamed the whole thing on them’…”

ABC: “Today, the tragic loss of life and wounding of more than 180 persons at the Boston Marathon were, amazingly, traced back to three pipe bombs in a CIA storage locker in Maryland…”

Suppose, in the midst of an uproar heard and echoed around the world, the networks stood by their contradictory versions of events and wouldn’t back down.

A massive blow would hit psyop-land. Centralized story? Poleaxed.

People wouldn’t know what to do. They expect one story line and they get three, from the highest hypnotic and influential media giants.

In a literal, though unconscious sense, familiar time and space would begin to fall apart.

But actually, it’s far more surreal for the three major television networks to agree on the substance of every significant event than to come to radically different conclusions.

Unfortunately, people don’t see it that way. They don’t see that three behemoths dispensing the same information represents a highly unnatural state of affairs.

On this subject, here are a few notes from a work-in-progress, The Underground:

“Fractured reality is approaching like a huge wave. Defections from the ranks of consensus are exploding. Therefore, the spaces of the mind are changing. Those who are holding the fort are trying to minimize the effect. That’s why they’re staging more ‘crises’. Crises are magnets. They attract the mass, the collective, the reality-addicts, the joiners, the people who will buy official images and feelings pumped out of the central factory.”

“Group-ideas which are obviously foolish and depleting and destructive are relatively easy to reject. But group-ideas that seem to herald a better world are the big deceptions. These ideas, in a vacuum, may be attractive and interesting, but because they emerge from a group they are going to induce a deep trance, in the long run. That is the intention. Not ‘a better world.’”

“Bargain price! We’ll shave down your perceptual field so you can fit in with eight billion androids. You’ll never miss what you can’t see. Yes, folks, we’ll cement you into the limited spectrum, where all the action is. There is a sense of family in this reality. People liking people. We’re all in this together.”

“Asking someone to imagine what his mind would be like if it were missing its entire collection of consensus-ideas goes over like lead matzos balls at a Catholic communion.”

“Very few people care about the space, time, and energy of psychological propaganda. They think it’s just lies. It isn’t. It’s a parallel world.”

“Escaping from the psyop called Reality occurs in stages. But unless the escapee opts for inventing his own reality and making it fact in the world, much as a painter invents on a blank canvas, he’ll fall back into the op. He’ll exist in a kind of limbo, knowing something about the truth but never rising to a level of true power. And he’ll spend his years making excuses, pulling himself further down in the process.”

PART TWO

“There is something you could call ‘machine perception’ or ‘system perception.’ A person sees through the filter of a system. How does he defeat that, change that? Not through the retraining of his eyeballs. No. But if he used his imagination widely enough, he would find that the filters dropped away. That’s quite a discovery. That’s why I developed many imagination exercises.” (Notes on Exit From The Matrix, Jon Rappoport)

Image credit: Robert Couse-Baker http://tinyurl.com/mqfgyey

Things are never exactly as they seem.

There is a good reason for this. Things are made. The ‘making’ aspect or the ‘created’ aspect is not readily visible. If it were, people would be waking up at a stunning rate. They would see the fuller dimension. They would realize how (hypnotically) focused they were on the result, as opposed to the individual inventor and the process of inventing. And their viewpoint on reality would expand and change forever.

Think of reality as a machine. A machine that produces objects.

You look at all the objects. You accept their existence. This acceptance is so pervasive that you believe reality equals the array of all those objects.

However, you press on. Lo and behold, you discover the machine. You look at it from all sides. What a find.

Then, you come upon an idea: if you go into the machine and see how it works, see how the parts mesh and function, you’ll know more. You’ll fathom the basis of reality.

After many years of exploring the guts of the machine, you understand it. This is metaphysics; the working of the machine. This is where traditional philosophers went. Of course, they came up with many different blueprints.

But there was yet another layer. The inventor of the machine. And how he put it together. How he made it work.

I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about something less complicated: the perception that a machine comes from the imagination of an inventor.

My grandfather was an inventor. In the early years of the 20th century, he put together a machine that would create links of chain. In one end, you fed wire. At the other end, the machine had tongs that looked like lips, and these lips chewed and twisted the wire into connected links. Long lines of chain piled up on the factory floor.

Reality—the things of reality—can be perceived as having come from imagination. This goes beyond metaphysics. This goes beyond blueprints. This suggests that you can also imagine and create reality.

And what you create doesn’t have to resemble what others have invented.

The road is open.

The artist in front of the blank canvas is free. He can go anywhere. He can start in one place and end up at another. He can wipe out sections of what he’s painted and insert something different.

Obviously, society is concerned with the output of the machine. That’s where the visible action is. The inventor, creator, the one who imagines—he has to carve out territory for himself.

Another aspect of the reality machine is propaganda. It promotes what it manufactures. It never stops promoting it.

And a third aspect of the machine is “the system of manufacture,” the fact that reality is put together as a system by a system. This enchants many people. They believe that by discovering the structure they will arrive at some ultimate destination. The inventor and the artist, however, see it differently. All systems are provisional, no matter how hard-wired they appear. Many systems work. They yield up results. However, there is no cosmic prescription about how new realities must be imagined or created.

What looks like a closed world is very, very open. This even extends to the space-time-energy continuum itself. For instance, the ability to achieve telepathy violates the standards of this “one-continuum” premise and its rules about energy transmission.

The reality machine is a device with several intentions, one of which is the induction of hypnotic focus on the output of the machine. In that sense, you could say this is a consumerist universe. As usual, the “products on the shelves” are sold by extolling their status in a grossly exaggerated fashion, to the point of claiming they are sacred—meaning they are turned out by some religious force.

Outside all this, outside the machine, there is you. With unlimited imagination and creative potency.

Which can be reclaimed again. Along with a non-machine world.

PART THREE

This is a backgrounder. It is not a canned list of instructions. Its purpose is to stimulate your own thinking.

Once upon a time, human beings lived in cultures where images were alive. What we now call superstitions were, to them, gods and demons and intermediary entities that transmitted or stole the juice and the energy and the power of life.

It’s nearly impossible to project ourselves into such an environment and experience the burgeoning passions that infused experience—because a great shift has occurred.

The West entered, with anticipation, a temple of the bald Sampson, where images disappeared, were swallowed up, were replaced by so-called rational faith.

This eventually precipitated a crisis. If you don’t have, or believe in, images that live and breathe and are intimately connected with life-force, how do you replace them? How do you avoid becoming pallid skeletons of science, whose productions never impart that same fire?

This crisis is reflected all around us every day.

We have become liberated, and in this liberation we are left with emptiness. On top of that, we have decided to assume that passions of the soul should be modulated, like elevator music, to somehow join with our advanced knowledge, in harmonic balance.

It’s no balance; it’s timidity, and this attitude makes people prey to an eerie tolerance of all opinion and custom and point of view and aspiration and stretched-out egalitarianism and even criminal action. Giving no offense, under any circumstances, for any reason, is now the coin of the realm.

You might say, with accurate assessment, that these are qualities of the successful salesman. And that is what so many people have become: ambassadors of the vague pulse of our “rational culture.”

We even think of it in religious terms. The message of this church is the honed and blown-dry embrace of Anything. As if this were the message of Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and other teachers of our blurry past.

To counterbalance this bleached present, many are drawn into dark theaters to watch suburban humans turned into bloodsucking harpooned-tooth neck fetishists and genetic mistakes and hair-sprouting wolves and irradiated monsters or heroes.

It’s the instant-coffee version of ancient Dionysian adventure. And the accompanying depiction of gym-sex on the screen wouldn’t stir the interest of a mouse in a barn.

Was this why and for what we abandoned the mysteries of the epoch of magic?

For freckled children in a British academy laboring through a paranormal costume drama, tricked out with the accoutrement of grottoes and dark halls?

The crisis on our hands now is not one that is going to go away. It is not going to recede as magic once receded. Because there WAS a reason we liberated ourselves from the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance—a reason beyond technology—and until we find it and face it and deeply accept the new struggle, we are going to see this simulacrum culture of ours make endless cartoons of itself in dried out oceans of concrete.

For what we need to do now, pharmaceuticals and brain research and genetic manipulation and cyber-affectation and instant global communication and worship (or desecration) of profit-making idols hold no answers.

Suppose what took us into the age of rationality was, in some way, connected to the realization that we were, all along, inventing our own demons and gods and demigods and entities of great life-force—and although that knowledge has been shoved into the background, as trivial and passe, while technology has soared, it is still with us, and it overshadows all our machines and their power.

Suppose this is the message: we are the majestic and wild creatures we built the temples to.

We are the makers; we are the architects of all the dreams—and not through some compensatory impulse, but because WE CREATE. That is our natural inclination and the source of our ecstasy. It is only civilization that seems to cast us in other roles.

Our societies and civilizations are arranged to make it seem as if imagination is a preposterous choice—when, in fact, that is what we are here for. That is what got us here.

Societies are actually in a satellite universe, and the prime universe is all imagination.

The underlying hidden and deeply buried cry of our age is: HOW CAN I CREATE?

The conclusion is: most people will do anything to avoid it.

And the universal compliant is: I DON’T UNDERSTAND.

NEVERTHELESS, WE ARE THE ARTISTS AND THERE ARE NO LIMITS.

While, in the deep past, we sucked the marrow out of the bones of the gods we invented and thereby felt enormous passions, we knew there was a missing piece, and that piece was an abyss over which we were hanging. So we came all this way to find out that we authored the labyrinth. We built the paths that gave us joy and terror, and now we can consciously and spontaneously make new worlds without end. Not simply as engineers, but as artists.

Swallowing that stark truth may be hard, may be upsetting, but it IS why we made the voyage.

And then pulled our punches.

This is no archaic revival. It’s now, today and tomorrow.

The universe is waiting for imagination for revolutionize it down to its core.

BUT THE REALITY SALESMAN CALLS

Step right up, folks. This is a deal you can’t afford to miss. You know that thing you cling to like a drowning man in a turbulent sea?

It’s called reality, and I represent the company that manufactures it. I’m proud to say I’ve held this job for over a hundred thousand years. So as far as product knowledge is concerned, you just aren’t going to find anybody like me.

Some folks believe reality is rocks and trees and desert and sun and rain, and brick and concrete and steel and glass, and the mountain ranges, the sky, the moon and the stars. They believe reality is a house and all the things in it, and the mementos you hold on to, to remind you of the past.

But I’m really selling…guess what? A little thing called perception. It sounds odd, but that’s what it is:

How you see things, and what you think about what you see.

Because to tell you the truth, no matter what time period you live in, whether on Earth or another planet, it all comes down to that. How you see what’s in front of you.

And believe it or not, perception comes in different forms. My company makes the perception that endures. It’s the package you’re living with right now. It’s the down-to-earth here-it-is straight-ahead common-sense type. We call it: IT IS WHAT IT IS. That’s trademarked, by the way. ISWIS. It is what it is.

ISWIS was invented by a very smart guy whose name has been long forgotten. He was a flaming genius, and he realized something great. People would go for ISWIS because it would lock them in.

People didn’t want a wobbling here-and-there kind of perception. Who wants to wake up on a Tuesday morning and suddenly see life in a completely different way? Who wants that kind of shock to the system?

ISWIS is the most popular perception package in the universe, bar none. Reliability. Consistency.

All those centuries and epochs ago, when I was a rookie training for this job, the guys let me try on a whole bunch of different perception packages, so I could see what kind of competition I was up against.
I saw things I wouldn’t want to describe to you. Horrible things. And when I was given ISWIS, our product, I felt like I was home.

ISWIS gives you the kind of stability you can count on for your whole life. And, believe me, that’s no small feat. We’ve built slow decay (SD) into the package, so things gradually deteriorate—because, think about it, do you really want that tree in your back yard to stay at one stage of growth forever? Do you? It might seem like a nice idea, but it would screw up the need for replacement, and then you’d get into the whole conundrum of THE BODY, too, and how long it should last. People like to think they want physical immortality, but if you give it to them (via some other package), they go crazy after a while. Because their problems, as well as their triumphs, never go away. I could show you a little planet where the inhabitants went for one of our competitor’s products. The suicide rate is over seventy percent! The place is a nuthouse!

ISWIS is time-tested. It’s as solid as solid can be made. It doesn’t break down.

But it does need boosters from time to time, and that’s why I’m here today talking to you.

Every twenty thousand years, we institute a planet-wide upgrade, just to make sure nothing goes wrong. And you’re all due.

Now, you could refuse, in which case you’ll have to take full responsibility for the ugly consequences, or you could do the right thing and just re-up. I have to tell you, our re-up rate is 99.859 percent. I’m proud of that figure.

By the way, the holdouts, the deniers, and the self-styled rebels? The governments of your planet keep track of you. I feel obligated to let you know that. They assume they need to. Without boosters, when your ISWIS breaks down, you’re going to fail to fit in. Most definitely you’re going to experience some things other people just won’t understand. And your governments will hunt you down and lock you up, or worse.

That’s not my doing, because I believe in the free market, but it’s part of my service to clue you into the whole picture.

But here is the good part. You can get your booster now, during our pre-op special, by simply signing for it and taking the pledge, and continuing to pay a mere sixty percent of your annual income for the rest of your lives. Which when you think about it, is nothing for what you’re getting. Again, reliability, and consistency.

In the small print, the pledge lays out a few details concerning IMAGINATION. This is for your own protection—because if you take imagination too far (and who knows how far that is, until it’s too late), you’ll set up what we call an interference field, which means ISWIS will tend to malfunction. You don’t want that.

So here’s the contract and the pledge. Sign on the dotted line, and pay the fee, and we’re done.

Thank you very much.

I love you guys. Really, I do. I admire your tenacity and your willingness to stay with our perception package. Our company continues to prosper because of you. Visit the ISWIS website and Facebook page and find out about upcoming picnics and vacation tours. We’re hosting booster events at thousands of locations.

If you don’t come to us, we’ll come to you.

We’ve got you on our list.

BEYOND STRUCTURES

We are fascinated with structures and systems because they work, and because some of us feel an aesthetic attraction to them.

They work until you want to do something different.

Magic, for example.

Magic is non-system.

Which puts it out of the reach of most people.

Because most people want to grab a structure and pull it around them and sit there like a bird in a cage. They want to go from A to B to C and feel the satisfaction of knowing it works every time.

Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all.

But go into a corporation and say you want to teach them creativity and they’ll say, “What’s the system?”

Once I told a personnel chief at a big company, “The system is to stand on your head.”

“Literally?” he said.

“No. People would find a system for that. But figuratively, that’s what you want to get people to do.”

He scratched his head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s where we start. I say something and you don’t understand. Then we have a chance.”

“What are you?” he said. “Some kind of zen teacher?”

“No,” I said. “If I said I was, you’d pigeonhole me. I teach non-systems.”

He laughed in an uncomfortable way.

“We don’t operate on non-systems here.”

“No, but if you let three or four people do that, they might come up with a product you never dreamed of.”

That he could understand. Vaguely.

Here’s how things work at some very big corporations. The second-tier honchos decide it’s time for a new product. They call in the chief of production and ask him what could be done. He suggests a whiz-it 4, which is basically a whiz-it 3 with a few more bells and whistles.

The honchos give him the green light, and he goes to work. He sets up a structure, which means he basically triggers the structure he already has. He gets underlings to make sketches of whiz 4, and with those he assigns compartmentalized tasks to various departments under him. The timetable is eighteen months.

He appoints a project supervisor to oversee the whole thing.

The project supervisor pretty much knows what’s going to happen. The six departments in charge of bringing in the whiz 4 on time will do okay—except one key department will fail miserably, because three guys in that dept. are lazy bums. They find ways to delay operations. They ask meaningless questions. They let work pile up on their desks. They meddle in other people’s business.

Twelve times, the production supervisor has tried to get these idiots fired. No go.

So everybody settles down to grind of bringing in whiz 4 on time.

Structure.

Manuals, rules and regs.

DMV, IRS. Play it by the book.

This can make magic the way an ant can fly to the moon.

So long ago it was in another life, I taught private school in New York. There were six kids in my class, all boys. I was supposed to teach them math. They were all at different levels. They had no ambition to learn math. No matter what I did, they performed miserably. Add, subtract, multiply, divide, decimals, fractions—it didn’t matter. If they managed to learn something on Monday, they forgot it by Tuesday. It was rather extraordinary.

So I took them to an art museum one morning. They were as lost there as they were in the classroom. But I wasn’t. That was the key. I was already painting in a little studio downtown, and I was on fire.

So I began to talk about the paintings. The Raphael, the Vermeer, the Rembrandt. The De Kooning, the Pollock, the Gorky. I had no plan, no idea. I just talked about what they could see if they looked.

And then we walked back to school and I set them up with paints and paper and brushes and told them to go to work. I said I didn’t care what they painted. Just have a good time. Do something you like.

All of a sudden, they weren’t making trouble. They were painting. No more whining and complaining.

I walked around and watched them go at it. I pointed to this or that area and mentioned what I liked.

There was no way to measure or quantify or systematize what the kids were doing that day, but they were coming alive, out of their sloth and resentment.

Then we got back to math, and it was as if they’d all experienced an upward shift in IQ.

That night, back in my studio, I made a note in my notebook. It went something like this: Give them a non-structure, and then follow that with a structure, it works.

So that was that.

There used to be something in this culture called improvisation. People understood what it was, even if they wouldn’t do it themselves. Now the word has almost vanished. Same with the word spontaneity. The moment when eye, mind, and brush meet canvas. When mind meets the new. When the inventor suddenly gets up from his chair and trots over to his workbench and starts putting pieces together.

The old zen guys called it no-mind. That didn’t mean you were a robot, it meant you had a very sharp mind, actually, but you just transcended it, you skipped through it like a flat stone on water. Structureless.

This becomes magic when imagination jumps into the fray. When the inventive urge takes the foreground.

The trouble with all these Asian spiritual practices now is that they have a long and distinguished history, and the history tends to infiltrate everything that’s happening. It’s venerated. That’s like throwing a heavy wrench into an engine. You need a clean slate, a wide open space. You need Now.

You need Now, which is dry tinder to the spark of imagination.

If you have enough history at your back and you stand away far enough, everything looks like pattern and structure and system. That’s the illusion. That’s the deception.

Magic doesn’t work that way.

The only problem magic has is: if you create it, who else will see it? That’s the only glitch—and that can be worked with.

You see, systems make people blind. If they can’t fold an event into a structure, then for them it isn’t there. This is very interesting. This is where all the myths of Hermes (aka Mercury) sprang from. He was the figure who flew and passed through walls and had no barriers in the space-time continuum—the tin can we call universe. So people pretended, at a deep level, that they were unable to comprehend him. In a real sense, he was invisible. His response to all this was to become a supreme joker. A trickster. He toppled idols of the hidebound, rule-bound, system-bound society.

If you read the myths of ancient Greece, you begin to see he ranked very high in the pantheon of the gods. There really was no reason he couldn’t be considered the king of the Olympians.

But he didn’t want the throne or the lineage. That was just another system, erected by his god-colleagues, who were bored out of their minds and desperately needed the entertainment and distraction it could provide.

Hermes was deep in the fire of his own imagination and speed and improvisation and spontaneous action.

Magic.

He didn’t need or want metaphysics, cosmology, ultimate truth, illumination, enlightenment, or Oneness and Bliss. He already embodied of all those things and much, much, much more.

The notion of shared, consonant, and structured reality as the final goal became an enormous joke.

The structure and system of life and society, from a certain live perspective, is a joke.

Many marriages become impossible because husband and wife find themselves trapped in a system, and they don’t know what to do. That’s the beginning and end of their problem. If they could move in and out of the system, while remaining married and loyal, they would realize everything is wonderful. It’s a magic trick.

To make it work, you need imagination, which is the thing that allows you to see structure as putty that can be moved around and reshaped at will. Imagination has all the creativity there is, and yet it is non-material, it’s outside the shapes people build to run their lives.

From the point of view of civilization, structure should be a sturdy platform, from which people can take off and create.

When I was 19, people thought I had a few problems, so I was sent to an office in New York to take a Rorschach Test. The specialist opened up a large notebook to a page of inkblots. He was a technician who did one thing in his job. He interpreted what people told him about those inkblots. He had a complex system that enabled him to categorize people according to various subtle shades and types of neuroses.

So he showed me an inkblot and said, “Tell me everything you see in it.”

“Everything?” I said.

“Yes.”

He was a stern neutral android, and he followed his playbook to the letter.

“Okay,” I said.

So 20 minutes later, I was still talking about that first inkblot. I think he had a dozen of those blots in his notebook, and he was supposed to show me every one.

I was cheating, of course. Which is to say, I was using my imagination. This was outside the rules, really.

The technician was sweating. He was squirming in his chair. Contemplating how many hours it would take to get through all the inkblots. We’d take a supper break and then come back for more, far into the night.

Finally he said, “That’s enough.”

“But there’s more,” I said.

“No,” he said. “That’s all right.”

He stared at me.

I stared at him.

Standoff at OK Corral.

In his system of universe, you could have two things. Normal and neurotic. I didn’t fit into either slot. He didn’t understand that. So to him, I was invisible.

As I left his office, I thought about my favorite radio show, The Shadow. Lamont Cranston renders himself invisible to the bad guys, and proceeds to torment them.